helping others

For this “hack” get yourself a mouse.

When you do something for someone else, the act in itself makes you feel good.

Even watching someone else do a good deed will lift your mood.

I know I feel good whenever I do or say something nice to someone else.When I worked in an outpatient psychiatric program I decided to see if this would hold true for the patients in my group. Luckily for me they were open to test this out. We talked about different ways of doing something kind for themselves and others.

On the first day patients spent an hour doing something nice for themselves and all self-reported feeling good. The second day they spent an hour doing something kind for someone else. All of them said they felt even better doing something kind for someone else than doing something nice for themselves.

Not only feeling emotionally better research shows that when we engage in good deeds, our stress is reduced.